Setting priorities for development of emerging interventions against childhood diarrhoea

An expert panel exercise was conducted to assess feasibility and potential effectiveness of 10 emerging health interventions against childhood diarrhoea. Twelve international experts were invited to take part in a CHNRI priority setting process. This group used 12 different criteria relevant to successful development and implementation of the emerging interventions, nine of which were retained in the final analysis. They showed most collective optimism towards developing household or community-level water treatment, followed by sustainable, affordable latrine options; those two emerging interventions were followed by antibiotic therapy of Cryptosporidium diarrhoea, and oral or transcutaneous enteric vaccine development

All trousers, no shirt

Review of Fred Moseley and Tony Smith, eds, Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination, Brill, Leiden and Boston MA, 2014. vii + 336 pp., £98.00 hb., 978900420952

History without history

Review of Frank Ruda, 'For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism', Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 2015. xxiv + 200pp., £32.50 pb., 978081013097

Modern European Philosophy

This chapter reviews four books published in 2018 which are not readily categorized as works in ‘modern European philosophy’: Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancloğlu, and Dalia Gebrial’s edited volume Decolonising the University, Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser’s Feminism for the 99%, and Andreas Malm’s The Progress of this Storm. Yet their uneasy relationship to this philosophy is precisely the reason they constitute a significant contribution to it. The philosophical originality and critical purchase of these books proceed from the fact that each is a singular case of philosophy’s dependence on ‘non-philosophy’; each exposes the impossibility of viewing philosophy as a self-sufficient discipline. In particular, they are a timely reminder that the best political philosophy is produced through actually existing social movements to change (which ecologically now means simply saving) the world. The chapter is divided into six sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Decolonizing Philosophy: Decolonising the University; 3. Anti-Post-Politics: For a Left Populism; 4. Anti-Post-Marxism: Feminism for the 99%; 5. Anti-Postmodernism: The Progress of This Storm; 6. Conclusion

Kostas Axelos, 'Introduction to a Future Way of Thought: On Marx and Heidegger'

Review of Kostas Axelos, 'Introduction to a Future Way of Thought: On Marx and Heidegger' Translated by Kenneth Mills, Edited and Introduced by Stuart Elden Meson Press, Luneburg, 2015. 180 pp., £10.60 / $16.70 pb. 978395796005

Marx and the concept of historical time

The guiding premise of this thesis is that the concept of historical time constitutes a distinct philosophical problem for Karl Marx’s work. Marx does not examine the relationship between time and history in his work, rendering the historicist framework of linear, progressive time the overriding framework through which he understands this relationship. However, the larger problem is that, despite this lack, the philosophical originality and critical function of Marx’s work is in no small measure defined by the contribution it makes towards our understanding of this relationship. Therefore, this thesis argues that it is necessary to construct a concept of historical time out of Marx’s work. Methodologically, this begins with an outline of the broad contours of the materialist concept of history in The German Ideology, and a temporal reading of the historical act – the creation of the means of human life – on which this concept is based. This reading is then ontologically grounded, first by Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, in order to establish how the act as such temporalises, and then by Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, in order to grasp how this temporalisation can be thought in relation to the movement of historical totalisation, which is to say the ongoing totalisation of the time of all human lives. In short, Heidegger and Sartre enable us to secure labour and need – the two concepts upon which the materialist concept of history depends – as the two basic forces upon which historical temporalisation depends. Yet if, as Marx’s Capital reveals, the specifically capitalist category of ‘abstract labour’ is the condition of thinking the transhistorical category of ‘labour in general’, and if abstract labour exists to satisfy capital’s need to self-expand, not the human’s need to live, then capital – not the human – is the condition of thinking history. Capital and its times give history its intelligibility, such that capitalism is the only standpoint (to date) from which ‘history as such’, ‘history itself’, can be conceived. However, the concept of historical time cannot simply register that capital makes the category of history possible. It must also account for the historically changing character of the relationship between time and history, and hence the possibility of social and historical time after capitalism

Diffusion tensor imaging and fiber tractography of the median nerve at 1.5T: optimization of b value

Objective: The objective of this study was to systematically assess the optimal b value for diffusion tensor imaging and fiber tractography of the median nerve at 1.5T. Materials and methods: This is a prospective study which was carried out with institutional review board approval and written informed consent from the study subjects. Fifteen healthy volunteers (seven men, eight women; mean age, 31.2years) underwent diffusion tensor imaging of the wrist. A single-shot spin-echo-based echo-planar imaging sequence (TR/TE, 7000/103ms) was performed in each subject at eight different b values ranging from 325 to 1,550s/mm2. Number and length of reconstructed fiber tracts, fiber density index (FDi), fractional anisotropy (FA), and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) were calculated for the median nerve. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was also calculated for each acquisition. The overall image quality was assessed by two readers in consensus by ranking representative fiber tract images for each subject using a scale range from 1 to 8 (1 = best to 8 = worst image quality). Results: Longest fibers were observed for b values between 675 and 1,025s/mm2. Maximum FDi was found at b values of 1,025s/mm2. FA was between 0.5 and 0.6 for all b values. ADC gradually decreased from 1.44 × 10−3 to 0.92 × 10−3mm2/s with increasing b values. Maximum SNR ± standard deviation (175.4 ± 72.6) was observed at the lowest b value and decreased with increasing b values. SNR at b values of 1,025s/mm2 was 48.5% of the maximum SNR. Optimal fiber tract image quality was found for b values of 1,025s/mm2. Conclusions: The optimal b value for diffusion tensor imaging and fiber tractography of the median nerve at 1.5T was 1,025s/mm

Animal lameness detection with radar sensing

Lameness is a significant problem for performance horses and farmed animals, with severe impact on animal welfare and treatment costs. Lameness is commonly diagnosed through subjective scoring methods performed by trained veterinary clinicians, but automatic methods using suitable sensors would improve efficiency and reliability. In this paper, we propose the use of radar micro-Doppler signatures for contactless and automatic identification of lameness, and present preliminary results for dairy cows, sheep, and horses. These proof-of-concept results are promising, with classification accuracy above 85% for dairy cows, around 92% for horses, and close to 99% for sheep

Setting priorities for development of emerging interventions against childhood pneumonia, meningitis and influenza

WAcute lower respiratory infections, which broadly include pneumonia and bronchiolitis, are still the leading cause of childhood mortality. ALRI contributed to 18% of all deaths in children younger than five years of age in 2008, and the main pathogens responsible for high mortality were Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae and respiratory syncytial virus. In addition, meningitis was estimated to contribute up to 200 000 deaths each year, and influenza anywhere between 25 000 and 110 000. It is widely acknowledged that a major portion of this mortality should be avoidable if universal coverage of all known effective interventions could be achieved. However, some evaluations of the implementation of World Health Organization’s (WHO) Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) strategy, which promotes improved access to a trained health provider who can administer “standard case management”, have shown somewhat disappointing results. Only a minority of all children with life-threatening episodes of pneumonia, meningitis and influenza in developing countries have access to trained health providers and receive appropriate treatment. Thus, novel strategies for control of pneumonia that balance investments in scaling up of existing interventions and the development of novel approaches, technologies and ideas are clearly needed